Leaders meeting, doors closed (addendum)

With the session officially scheduled to end Monday, state leaders will meet today at 4:30 p.m. to talk about outstanding issues. The meeting, unlike some held last year under former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, won’t be open.

Gov. David Paterson had signaled the three-men-in-a-room (or five, counting the minority leaders) motif was back last week when he commented last week that the open meetings of the past didn’t work out, and it’s not the way things get done. “You never see President Bush sitting down negotiation with Nancy Pelosi on television…We tried to negotiate in public. There was a huge fight over campaign finance” that in the end, he said, damaged one of his and Spitzer’s key initiatives.

Critics had long complained that the legislative session often comes down to the governor and top legislative leaders thrashing out agreements at the 11th hour in private, followed by a frenzy of bill passing by lawmakers who haven’t even read the legislation they’re voting on. But the public meetings, some said, weren’t an improvement, and were more about posturing than negotiating.

Addendum: The public meetings, a reader points out, began under former Gov. George Pataki.

As for whether the session really will end on Monday as scheduled, Paterson had said he didn’t see a point in extending it, but there’s talk around the Capitol that it could go further into the week.